Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway Biography Born September 6th, 1944, Donna Haraway is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches in the History of Consciousness Department and the Feminist Studies Department. Aside from teaching at UC Santa Cruz, she is also an affiliated faculty member in the Women's Studies, Anthropology and Environmental Studies Boards at the university, as well as being a professor of feminist theory and technosciences in the Media and Communications Program at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. In 1966, Haraway received Bachelor degrees in zoology and philosophy, as well as fulfilling enough requirements for an English Major. In 1972 she went on to earn her PhD in biology from Yale after spending a year prior in Paris where she studied philosophies of evolution. She has been awarded honors and scholarships for her contributions in the fields she's a part of and the departments she teaches in. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" Background & Historical Context In A Cyborg Manifesto, ''Haraway highlights the problematic use and justification of Western traditions like patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism (among others). These traditions in turn allow for the problematic formations of taxonomies (and identifications of the Other) and what Haraway explains as "antagonistic dualisms" that order Western discourse. These dualisms, Haraway states, "have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals... all those constituted as others." She highlights specific problematic dualisms of self/other, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man (among others). She explains that these dualisms are in competition with one another, creating paradoxical relations of domination (especially between the One and the Other). However, high-tech culture provides a challenge to these antagonistic dualisms. Key Textual Words - Chimeras (ref. NATC pg 2191/2nd paragraph first sentence). # a capitalized : a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail b : an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts # 2 : an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially : an unrealizable dream (http://www.merriam-webster.com). - Cyberfeminism - a new wave of feminist theory and practice that seeks to reclaim techno-science. - Cyborg - "a creature in a post-gender world; it has no track with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity (2191);" a "hybrid of machine and organism" that is a metaphor for the "'disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self' of contemporary cultural theory suited to the West's late capitalist social order (2187)." - Dualism (from the Latin word ''duo meaning "two") denotes the state of two parts. The term dualism was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been more generalized in other usages to indicate a system which contains two essential parts. - Holism (from Greek ὅλος holos "all, whole, entire") is the idea that systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. This often includes the view that systems function as wholes and that their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts. (Wikipedia). - Homework Economy - the restructuring of feminization o the workplace. - Manifesto: A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government. A manifesto usually accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus and/or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It often is political or artistic in nature, but may present an individual's life stance. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. (Wikipedia). - Marxist/socialist feminist (or feminism) - Polymorphism: the condition of occurring in several different forms. Key Quotations - "I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field." - "In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the western sense—a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space" - "The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential." - "I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity t confront effectively the dominations of 'race,' 'gender,' 'sexuality,' and 'class'" (2199). - "The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust...that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are ware of holsim, but needy for connection..." (2192). - "Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social sciences. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse" mine. JR ) (2193). - "Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture" (2192). - Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric?" (2196). - "As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists" (2198). Textual Analysis & Interpretation Haraway explains that the metaphor of the cyborg and everything that it encompasses is full of irony. Her article itself is rather ironic as well because she describes the cyborg, "creatures simultaneously animal and machine," almost negatively while at the time describing the importance of the nature of cyborgs to survive because they have the ability to stop seeing the world as a fight between two dualisms-man and woman (Norton ''2190). She even ends "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" by stating, "Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" (''Norton ''2220). Haraway is concerned with moving away from ideas of various dualisms-the most important being gender and identity- that give boundaries and constrictions; her metaphor of the cyborg is meant to show this because the cyborg's identity is fluid and ever-changing with a focus on science and technology rather than focusing on nature and sex themselves. Haraway has hijacked the word cyborg--from cybernetics (mechanical replacements for human functions, i.e., machines) and organisms (as in organic, i.e., biologically based)--to create an awareness of new, alternate path, that is neither feminist nor socialist, but both. She even says in the first line of "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" that "this essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," in short, by using the word "Cyborg" as a term for the late 20th Century move away from postmodernism, into greater and and more sophisticated technologies, the acceptance of feminism as a mode of thinking, and translating that into a "utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender"; a world that we can say with thirty years of hindsight is closer and closer to her cyborg ideal every year. I include gender and sexual identity, taboo subjects in the 80s,that Haraway touches on, in this discourse, as they are now routine, everyday,and accepted by this new generation of young adults (as well as the generations behind them) as nothing exceptional, just simply the way things are--other belief systems are viewed as archaic and in a way, ridiculous. In that way, Haraway's forward thinking piece about cyborgs was revolutionary for its time and perhaps why it has remained an important piece in the feminist and socialist rhetorical canon. References Related Texts & Objects *''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) - by Haraway *''Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective - also by Haraway'' *Wolfe, Cary. "Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities." *Marx, Karl. "Capital. Volume I." *Freud, Sigmund. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." *Haraway, Donna; Wolfe, Cary. ''Manifestly Haraway (Posthumanism). ''Minnestoa: Univesity of Minnesota Press (2016). Major Criticism Haraway's view takes issue with some traditional feminists who seek to place women above men.The views of traditional feminism operate under the totalizing assumptions that all men are one way, and women. Haraway suggests that feminists should move beyond naturalism and essentialism, criticizing feminist tactics as "identity politics" that victimize those excluded, and she proposes that it is better strategically to confuse identities. * Simon, Peter, editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.